After Russian atrocities, a Ukrainian town wants justice. Why the UN might not offer much help

BUCHA, Ukraine — The shops are full again. Bullet holes have been plastered over, and roadbeds torn by tank treads repaired. The dead now rest in lovingly tended graves.

But a year after this once-bucolic suburb of Kyiv became a watchword for gruesome wartime atrocities, scars remain, and the path toward achieving any kind of accountability, even years from now, remains strewn with obstacles.

While under Russian occupation in the early days of the war, the town of Bucha was the scene of what rights groups and investigators describe as a systematic campaign of killings and torture of Ukrainian civilians.

Like jagged rocks exposed by a retreating tide, the full horrors emerged as Russian forces pulled back: bodies left behind on streets and sidewalks, in kitchens and cellars, in back gardens and communal burial sites. Corpses with their hands bound, or bearing wounds and broken bones, or